(First Edition, Signed Bookplate) From the cartoonist hailed as "the heir to R. Crumb and Art Spiegelman" (Economist) comes this monumental, wordless depiction of the most infamous day of World War I, presented as a 24-foot-long, panoramic drawing in an accordion-folded, slipcased edition. Launched on July 1, 1916, and devouring more than a million men by time the offensive halted, the Battle of the Somme has come to epitomize the madness of World War I. In the first day alone, 20,000 British soldiers were killed, and another 40,000 wounded. In his single, continuous drawing, Joe Sacco depicts the events of that day, from General Douglas Haig and the massive artillery positions behind the trench lines to the legions of soldiers going "over the top" and getting cut down in no-man's-land, followed by the tens of thousands of wounded soldiers retreating and the dead being buried en masse. Here too is an illustrated companion booklet with an essay by historian Adam Hochschild, from his book To End All Wars. Daedalus is offering this extraordinary work in a first edition, with a bookplate signed by Sacco and Hochschild.

"Joe Sacco is a genius. Easily one of the most important journalists, writers and cartoonists alive, every stroke of his assured and humblingly mature pen captures what the camera simply cannot. Through his reserved yet compassionate use of words and pictures, he allows us to occupy the horrifying inner and outer boundaries of human cruelty and desperation—yet all, I believe, with the aim of returning to what it means to be a civilized, sympathetic and possibly even forgiving soul."—Chris Ware